Category: Uncategorized
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The Boxer Rebellion: Ocean By Ocean
We had a couple of The Boxer Rebellion albums last year; they’re one of those bands playing finely honed pop music whose fans adore them but who mysteriously fail to get big (though as getting big means playing barns like the Manchester Arena and staying smaller means playing more personal gigs at the Apollo or…
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Day At The Lake
The clock was turned back over a century at a local beauty spot this weekend as its heyday as the Blackpool of the Potteries was recreated. Wild Rumpus, organisers of the Just So Festival, took over Rudyard Lake over the weekend and laid on the entertainment that Potteries workers would have enjoyed in the mid-1800s,…
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Kris Drever: If Wishes Were Horses
We reviewed the excellent Blair Dunlop last week, putting new life into folk. Drever’s day job is with Lau, famed for improvisation and adding electronica and fancy production, also putting new life into folk. This solo album shows that Drever still loves the old stuff, and it’s about as traditional a folk album as you…
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Rusty G’s: Low
This is classic old school rock; we played it through a couple of times and were moderately impressed. Then we learned Rusty G’s is just a duo — James Finch on vocals/guitar and Dan Lopez on drums — and were even more moderately impressed. The downsides first. There’s a naming convention for four-legged bands: White…
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Phil Collins: Hello I Must Be Going
The latest in the series of remastered and expanded Collins reissues is this, his second solo work and follow-up to 1981’s Face Value. While the latter is a pop album, Hello saw Collins adopt a style that was more akin to the music he made with Genesis. Playing it first time through, our main feeling…
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Lucius: Good Grief
Lucius — Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe — have toured/worked with the likes of Roger Waters, Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy/Wilco and David Byrne, so they’re good singers and know their stuff. We’ve found that albums by backing singers can be hit and miss — standing behind a talented songwriter for 100 gigs doesn’t mean some…
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Trio Ismena: Five Danish Piano Trios
Since we started reviewing classical CDs, we’ve noticed two things: most CDs get no reviews at all and many reviews that do appear don’t say much. “It’s good to have a chance to hear all five works so superbly played,” says the Music Web review of this, which is 100% true but 100% uninformative —…
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Christine and the Queens: Chaleur Humaine
Christine (really Héloïse Letissier, but those accents and spellings are far too European for us Brits) could build herself a house if she turned all the glowing reviews she’s collecting into bricks. (There’s an analogy that didn’t go as well as expected). It’s clearly a good album, to get all those glowing reviews, but it’s…
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The Mining Co: Burning Sun and The Atomic Powers Within
We’ve been playing this likable slow burner quite a lot but it’s hard to write a lot about it. The intro of opening song Country Heart reminds us of something, possibly James Taylor’s Fire And Rain, and Taylor is a good comparison. It’s well-crafted and heartfelt, with acoustic guitar and steel/country in the background to…
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Kimmo Pohjonen: Sensitive Skin
They’re pleasantly mad in Finland: any country that would enter a hard rock/heavy metal band into the Eurovision Song Contest has got to be eccentric. The fact that Mr Lordi won shows that we find such behaviour endearing. Thus with this, a prog album from an accordionist, featuring the Kronos Quartet and distributed by the…
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